Our mission is to join individuals and groups working in different ways to ensure that our children live in a rational, sustainable world.
When enough people abandon the belief that war is inevitable,it will become unthinkable.
War is conducted for corporate Empire. Therefore,the first step to ending war is ending corporate control of the US government.
All social justice efforts lead to the end of war, the ultimate injustice. Those who work for justice are Soldiers For Peace.

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Thursday, August 29, 2013

A CIRCLE HAS NO LEFT OR RIGHT

It’s great to see more Americans abandoning the false left-right dichotomy all
the time. It is nothing but a construction of the corporate media to serve the
interests of the wealthy power brokers who fund right-wing think tanks. They
control the way Americans think about politics by controlling how it is
discussed in the mainstream media and as a result, by most politicians. It is
not a contradiction to refer to a “right wing” when arguing to abandon the artificial
divide between Americans who consider themselves either liberal or conservative.
I am using the term as it was understood by everyone when I was growing up: “Right-wing”
at that time was generally recognized to refer to the economic and political
elite of nations other than the US. It
is a term that used to be reserved for the ruling class of banana Republics who
maintained power by terror alone. Back
then, no American politician would have wanted to claim membership in such a
group.

It is useful to think of the spectrum of American political opinions as a
circle rather than a line with two ends separated by a shifting middle. In contrast, a circle is a symbol of continuity.
It is a line curved upon itself, with no beginning and no end. If America ever becomes a democracy, we
certainly want it to stay one forever, after all who have died believing they
were giving their lives to defend it. A
circle is also a symbol of universality.
In Venn diagrams, it represents the universe of all objects in a given
class, such as all Americans or all humans. That is a fitting symbol of a democratic
society, where decisions are made by consensus and every citizen who wants to
have a voice is included in the discussion. A circle is also symmetric. The two
halves are complementary, like yin and yang. Both are necessary to form the whole, and
neither is entire of itself. Without
appreciating both, one cannot fully conceive of either. Similarly, in a true democracy all views are considered
and openly discussed in order to visualize all possible solutions in the
process of achieving consensus on how to move forward together.

As the costs of allowing corporate interests to control the US government
continue to multiply and to affect average Americans, the list of issues on
which Americans can find common cause continues to grow. It is only a matter of
time before pundits still arguing about political ideologies that are nothing
more than convenient rhetorical devices realize that no one is listening.
Instead, we will be having a real dialogue about practical solutions to issues
affecting us. Members of Congress cannot continue to ignore this trend. If they
don’t start facing critical issues of common concern to people who regard
themselves as being at various points along the political spectrum, they will
pay a price. Americans can decide for themselves who will represent them once
they recognize and accept that both major parties are in the employ of the
corporate interests that fund their campaigns, When they do, they will abandon
the myth of the two-Party system and realize that solving the problems
threatening the viability of the American experiment in democracy is more
important than ideology. How one wants
to describe the system of government will be unimportant if we hand complete
control of it to a police state that operates exclusively in the interest of
the economic elite.

It was clear from the number of Ron Paul supporters who joined with Green Party
partisans in Occupy encampments around the nation that people are seeing
through the lies that are used to divide us and thereby keep us incapable of
establishing a government of, by and for the People. The biggest issues then
were outrage at government inaction against the banksters who destroyed the
economy, the unchecked power of the Federal Reserve and the outrageous abuse of
American military power to wage wars for corporate Empire that benefitted the
rich at the cost of the lives of the poor and the wealth of the nation. While
Occupy managed to avoid being coopted by any particular view point, it failed
to address the fundamental ideological divide that separated the Libertarians
from the socialists, although the progressive anarchists tried. It is time now
to move beyond amorphous demands for redress of the problems we all agree exist
and to the difficult work of having the national dialogue about what we can do
to end them together.

Events are conspiring that seem to be leading inevitably to the kind of
awakening among average Americans that we have been working for since it became
obvious that the Anglo-American Empire is no longer afraid of public opinion in
the US or anywhere else. Just as the power of the banks was revealed by the
immunity for the crimes they committed that crashed the US and world economy, the
threatened assault on Syria is leading to outrage throughout a broad swath of
the American public. The lies are so transparent that even the Washington Post began to refer to the "alleged" use of chemical weapons by the Syrian military in a story about the decisive defeat in Parliament of a vote to support an illegal, non-UN sanctioned US attack. The same article describes members of Congress on both sides of the aisle asking questions no one asked Bush in 2001 or 2003.

The fact that members of both parties were involved in the attempt to ram through a war no
sane American wants to see makes it obvious that the Iraq lies were not a
partisan problem solved by putting a Democrat in the White House. The rot of
corruption goes much deeper, and people are starting to see that. Articles on
conservative blogs are attacking the President and his party less often and the issues more, while blogs that often serve as a forum for
Democratic apologists are publishing criticism of policies that more
often than not come out of the same playbook as his Republican predecessor, such as a blog in the Daily Kos detailing the Congressional demands for consultation and an article in the Huffington Post that points out how deeply unpopular the proposed attack on Syria is.

It is becoming easier to help newly alert citizens to connect the dots that
have been obvious to some of us for some time. The furious reaction to the
revelations of NSA spying have interrupted the ongoing partisan nonsense of pundits
representing the two sides of the corporate Duopoly long enough for them to
agree that the abridgement of civil liberties has gone on long enough,
prompting even Congress to act. The furor resulted in the near-passage on a
bipartisan vote of the Amash amendment that would have restricted NSA spying .
Such resistance to Presidential overreach of authority to strip Americans of
basic constitutional rights would have been unthinkable even six months ago. It
is only a matter of time before Americans collectively grasp the idea that war
abroad, economic disaster and suspension of civil liberties at home are all
symptoms of the same problem: corporate control of the US government. When they
do, they will be ready for the solution.

There is no doubt that corruption of the US government by corporations and
wealthy individuals is at the root of the problem. There are many proposals to
do something about it, but the one with legs is the movement to pass a
constitutional amendment to effectively reform campaign finance and abolish
corporate personhood. When America has the discussion about why we need such an
amendment and what form it should take, we will be ready to elect
representatives who are willing to cosponsor and vote for it. If we make our
votes conditional on such support irrespective of party, we can make our votes
count by electing a Congress that will pass it. This is not going to end
corruption in and of itself, but in electing a Congress willing to cut off the corrupting
special interest money in elections we will have taken the first step to address
the other sources by which they corrupt government.

It is not hard to see that the mood of the country is shifting away from
helpless acceptance at the theft of what they have assumed is our democracy.
Surely a politician as brilliant as Obama can see it. That raises the
interesting question. Is it possible that he knows that we will not “be the
change” he told us we have to be in 2008 unless things get so bad that we
finally have no choice but to act? Is that why he seems to be doing nothing to
counter the trend toward fascism in America? We can always hope that those we
have accused of blind faith might have been right in claiming that Obama is
playing three-dimensional chess with a bunch of checker players. Only time will
tell, and only if the movement to take back America for the People continues to
grow.

2 comments:

Absolute boudlerdash as 90% of veterans and active duty soldiers online and in veterans organizations and groups and the organizations themselves are radical far right wing nuts and warmongers and are not interested in the truth.

Thanks for reading and commenting, Ronald. You are totally mistaken, however. You got any poll data to support that? I know from experience that the great majority of combat veterans know that war is a scam. Vietnam veterans are in general fully aware that they were lied to and used, then thrown away. That provided a fast education about what war is really about.

The veterans of the "War on Terror" are waking up in even greater numbers and at a younger age. They were even more abused, lied to about benefits that most signed up for as well as why we were fighting, which was the motivation for the rest, they come home to a society that has forgotten them and is falling apart to the point they cannot support their families.

In 2008, the majority of active duty voted for Obama. There was also poll data even earlier showing that the majority no longer believed Hussein had anything to do with 9/11, in contrast to your average Fox viewer.

The reason that you don't know this is because the media paints a picture that is contrary and because those who didn't see combat in earlier wars or only light combat are flag wavers who very loudly demand that we "support the troops" and who equate that with supporting war, since it is a source of pride for often otherwise unnotable people clueless about the real world so who do nothing to improve it.

In contrast, as you no doubt know from your experience as a therapist, those who suffered in combat enough to develop PTSD are afraid of conflict so do not speak up in public. I believe that is changing and that we must encourage it, because veterans are highly respected by most people.

I actually started Soldiers For Peace International with a group of about 25 mostly conservative vets who agreed that it was time to end war. They didn't think it possible so did nothing to make it happen. They especially didn't stand up publicly because they are still afraid of conflict and their friends are generally brainwashed flag wavers. However, these same people are very angry at the government. If we can educate them to the fact that war is the last thing we should trust our government on and the real cause of their growing economic misery, we will get them on our side and you will see many veterans speaking out, including those who are on our side but unwilling to say so yet.

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OUR GOAL: The eradication of war by restoring democracy in America.

OUR MISSION: To challenge the US Congress to put the needs of the people above those of their plutocratic sponsors. We can only establish democracy in America and the world by working together to abolish the "rights" of corporations and those who control them to determine the collective destiny of the Peoples of the United States and of the world.

THE PROBLEM: is not that the American government does not work. It works fine for those who own it, just not for the people of America. It is corporate control of Congress that permits the enslavement of Peoples of other nations and ultimately, Americans as well.

Now that the global economic elite are bringing their tools of subjugation to the United States, we must fight back together to ensure that the hope of government of the People, by the People and for the People does not perish from the Earth.

Together, we can mend the social fabric of a broken nation and assure liberty and justice for all the Peoples of the planet we share.

War and lack of health care are symptoms of the same disease: corporate control of the US government. That is why we must take back America for the people by working to pass a Constitutional amendment to get corporate money out of elections and abolish corporate personhood. This is the essential first step to creating true representative government.

Until Americans learn to fight their common enemy instead of each other, there is no reason to expect real change. We must put aside our differences to fight the imposition of a corporate New World Order if we are going to ensure that our children grow up in a rational, sustainable world where war is but a memory.